On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ Marielle V Jakobsons has a new album due out on Thrill Jockey. The record, The Patterns Lost to Air, doesn’t arrive until late February 2026, but a first track, the opener, “Warm Spring,” is up now. It was made with, primarily, violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog Matriarch, and it is a fully formed exploration of slowly evolving melodies and broken reflections.
▰ Autechre’s music is sometimes described as the sound of things breaking down, so it is somewhat ironic that C. Reider, who opened for Autechre on their October 1 Denver tour date, found afterward that “the recording of the performance was ruined by a bad cable.” Unruffled, he set about re-recording the set, now titled New Impossibilities, and then uploaded it to his Bandcamp account. It’s a half hour of rhapsodic noise table activities: buzzing whirs, churning substrata, crunching irritants. Good stuff.
▰ There is a new Stars of the Lid fan site at starsofthelidforever.com that documents, to date, nearly 20 live shows by the ambient duo, which consisted of Adam Wiltzie and the now deceased Brian McBride. Definitely check out the 2008 set from Echoplex in Los Angeles, for which they performed, along with other pieces, Arvo Pärt’s “Frartes” and some of Alexandre Desplat’s score for the film Syriana. (Thanks, Paul Ashby, for letting me know about it.)
